At point-of-sale (P.O.S.) or display units in retail outlets, it is convenient to present articles and products in an eye-catching and easily accessible manner. Furthermore, these point-of-sale or display units act as a storage area for articles and products. Thus, it is necessary to maximize the amount of storage space utilised, while at the same time enabling a customer to easily select and take products away for purchase. To achieve this, as articles are removed, it is desirable for the shelf to present the next stored article being forwardly filled for easy selection by a customer. Some dispensers have sprung-biased mechanisms that push articles forward. Some other known display devices use gravity feed mechanisms to cause articles to flow to the forward-most sale position.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,396,997 discloses a dispensing device having upper and lower jar guides with a plurality of glass jar containers loaded on their sides through a container loading area. The dispenser racks successively feed one container at a time to the container dispensing area to thereby provide a self-feeding and self-facing storage, dispensing and display system. One drawback of such system is that loading of the dispensing device must be done manually and individually. A rotatable door panel is provided so that loading occurs through the openable upper jar guide. Accordingly, in such system the articles are fed one at a time into the upper jar guide. Loading in this manner can be slow. Additionally, the products being displayed in the dispensing device are usually transported to a retail outlet in a carton or box containing a number of such articles. If the dispensing device is not capable of holding all of the articles contained in the delivered carton or box, then any articles that could not be loaded into the dispensing device need to be stored elsewhere in the retail out-let in the part emptied carton or box until such time as the dispensing device can accommodate those articles.
It is therefore desirable to improve the manner in which the filling of the dispensing devices takes place. It is desirable that the filling is quick, enables full cartons of delivered goods to be accommodated in the dispensing device. Moreover, it is desirable that the requirement for storing any extra articles that cannot be displayed is avoided. Further, it is beneficial that such dispensing devices are made from a minimum amount of material. The dispensing devices should also be as eye-catching as possible to the customer and contain branding, advertising and/or marketing material for this purpose. Since the advertising and branding materials and graphics are frequently changed and altered in line with trends and promotions, it is desirable that the dispensing devices are adaptable to facilitate quick changeovers in the branding, advertising and marketing graphics displayed thereon.